Tekken 2

Every series seems to have 'that game' that ends up among the ranks of the forgotten.

Since I started reviewing games almost two years ago, I have played plenty of forgotten, totally out there titles, the Shadow Madness-es and Nano Breakers and Gain Grounds of the world.  That was to be expected.  Hell, that was the point of this entire thing to begin with.  What I didn't expect was how many mainstream series' I would touch, whether it was via Mega Man X5/6X, Castlevania: Lament of Innocence or Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.  Those are all offbeat games from big time gaming heavyweights, something that I have found a surprising amount of.  

Tekken 2 doesn't quite fit into that mold.  The aforementioned games were never really considered a big deal, even if the series' they are a part of were household names.  Tekken 2 was absolutely a huge deal when it came out, a highly anticipated sequel to one of the PS1's most popular fighting games.  Arcades were on their last legs in 1995, but this was one of the last cabinets I remember being ubiquitous throughout the few that you could find around my hometown.  It's console release almost a year later was also well received.  So what happened?  Why is T2 not talked about with the same references as either of the other early entries.

Simply put, it finds itself stuck in limbo between its revolutionary predecessor and outstanding sequel.  Unlike most series, Tekken's early offerings really did get better with each edition.  T2 is definitely a better game than the first Tekken, but it's far inferior to the third.  Tekken 3 is phenomenal, there's not much more to explain about that.  But the original Tekken was just so different than anything that was out there at the time.  It had a then unique control scheme and focused on more realistic fighting.  "That burning feeling is from your broken ribs, not some fireball" touted magazine ads in GamePro and EGM. Namco may not have made a perfect game, but they gave people what they were craving in the fighting genre after years of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat clones: something different.  Even its early 3D fighting cousins (sort of, its complicated, but Tekken is technically not a 3D fighter even though most of us group it as one) Battle Arena Toshinden and Virtua Fighter had a level of silliness that Tekken just didn't.  So even though T2 is better than its predecessor in just about every way, it didn't have the "new" factor of the first game.

T2 brings back all the characters from the original game, with one more added to the basic roster.  Each character has an alter ego of sorts that they face in boss battles and all of these characters are unlockable as well.  Throw in a few more unlockable fighters for a total of 25.  That was a big roser for the time and unlike the first game, the boss characters aren't straight palette swaps of the primary characters (though they are still similar).  There's a good variety of fighting styles and each character brings something different to the table.  You have quick characters that rely on flurries like Native American Michelle and Bruce Lee knockoff Law, big guys that like to throw their weight around like cyborg Jack and Pro Wrestler King, and more well rounded characters like police officer Lei and spy Nina.  All of them have substantial amounts of special moves, most of which can be chained together to perform devastating combos.

The controls also return from the first game, with high and low punch and kicks along with a block button.  You can double tap the dpad to run and pressing two of the four buttons in concert unleashes either a special move or a throw.  Everything is very responsive and the controls are intuitive.  There are a few special moves that are nearly impossible to pull off, but the reward is usually substantial.  If you do manage to hit someone with one of these moves, it's likely going to drain most of their health.  If I have one issue with the controls, its that there was no consideration to console play when they were designed.  Trying to press square and circle at the same time is damn near impossible.  It's very clear there was still an arcade first mentality going on.  It's obviously not a huge deal, this control scheme persists in Namco's premier fighters, Tekken and Soul Caliber, to this day.

Graphics aren't the greatest, everything is super squared and blocky.  I know this was came out relatively early in the Playstation's life cycle, but the console was still capable of better.  The backgrounds in particular are disappointing, they are static and there's very little to look at.  It almost looks like they just animated the bottom half of the screen and the top half is just a copy/pasted image that was moved to back.  Sound is a little better, the music is hard to hear but most of it is solid.  The sound effects are where the game really stands out.  Everything blow sounds like it makes a huge impact and hitting your opponents is satisfying as can be.  It almost takes away from the realism a bit, but I think that's okay.

The real issue here is balance.  Some characters are just dead to others and I feel like some of the faster characters' attacks do a little too much damage.  It's almost as if Namco hadn't figured out how much each attack should do and why it should do so much.  They got the basic striking down and they got the big moves down, but its the stuff in the middle that's frustrating.  Having Paul 2-shot you with a very basic special move gets old very, very fast.  For as difficult as it is to get close to your opponent, I also think throws should do more damage.  I also can't figure out the priority system or how knockdowns and getting up work.  Part of that is on me, but I still don't think T2 does a good job of demonstrating how all of this functions.

In the end, Tekken 2 is still a really solid fighting game.  It had a huge roster for the time and offered a number of different modes beyond 1v1.  This wasn't a given at the time and both of these things are important for keeping a fighting game interesting for more than five minutes.  I'm still not sure this is totally worth going back and playing today, if only because Tekken 3 did everything so much better.  That game is awesome, it's full of unlockables, has great graphics and is far, far more balanced. Tekken 2 is merely good.  But they also feel like they are of different eras.  Tekken 3 came out in 1997 and reached home consoles in 1998, quite possibly the two best years in gaming history.  This was around the time that developers were really starting to know what they were doing and what gamers wanted.  T3 almost feels like a culmination of what Namco intended the series to be, while T2 feels like it was a step along the way.  At least it wasn't a step in the mud.

7/10